FIRST BONERS: an awankening

THE OTHER NIGHT I had yet another great encounter in the Nod House. She and I were both in and outside a film, making out, when I became aware that soon the dream would be over and I’d once again have lost out on an emotionally & physically rewarding relationship. I asked her what other films she’d been in, so I could look her up on IMDB once I was forced back into wakefulness. She went on to list a few, none of which I had heard of — the most interesting of which was a horror film about a toilet with a set of eyes embedded in its tank, facing the wall, which no one ever discovered were there.

In any case, I woke up, sighed, and went about the business of trying to figure out what the fuck planet this *is* anyway.

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It would often seem that the women I meet in my dreams, divorced from the sheer mechanics of fantasy, have at times provided a fuller, more complex, and healthier array of experiences than those I’ve been romantically involved with in the waking world — tho certainly not for lack of hope or trying. I’ve fallen in love, been married, known passions unexplored otherwise, and had weepy moments of self-reflexive conversation in which we addressed whether our interaction was founded on past lives, cognitive magnetism aspiring toward actualization, or simply the phantasmal workings of my mind alone. I’ve written of experiences of this sort before.

Regardless, I’ve recently been considering my personal foundations for attraction, no matter their plane of operation. Everyone has their first crushes, grade-school infatuations and the like. Personally, I can’t remember a time when the romantic impulse didn’t thrive inside me. In kindergarten, there was a girl named Leanne Wolff. I tried to convince a friend of mine to help me build a net to use to catch her so she’d marry me. In first grade, braving mutual embarrassment, I knelt and kissed a girl’s hand in front of our entire classroom. Then in second grade, my first official girlfriend, Crystal Shepherd, and, next year, Crystal Lakes. I’ve been steadily heartbroken ever since.

Sexual awakenings, of course, are of a different sort entirely.

: : : : :

We never had cable when I was young, so I was happy to visit my granny in Kentucky who not only had cable but also a basement that was very much an apartment unto itself, with a kitchen with a fridge full of root beer, a bed, a living room set, etc. I’d stay up sometimes all night watching the most bizarre and/or sexual programming I could find, usually on MTV or TBS.

BIKINI CAR WASH COMPANY 2.
I still remember.
Aroused but baffled and not knowing what to do,
I batted around my nine year old erection like a cat.

Undoubtedly tho, the most important moment in these early basement explorations was the moment I met Aeon Flux.

Perfect confluence of sexual/bizarre, AEON FLUX not only revealed to me just how exciting and strange popular entertainment could be (and smart too, I’d discover upon revisiting it as an adult), but also introduced me to a type of woman that, oddly enough, my interest has never made good on. Not a complaint but just sayin’.

Considering the line I’ve just drawn between A and B, it’s a bit unusual that this most important figure of my pre-pre-adolescence didn’t blossom into fetishism. Perhaps having grown up dominated by women and consequently raging against the structures thus built has too deeply instilled a sense of shame at the thought of ever willfully submitting for fear of what doesn’t prove playful but genuinely domineering on a level even more visceral than the world of emotions on which I’m already so frequently flayed.

The poison was in the wound, you see. No way I want to suck it out myself.
Rather it’d be nice to have one who’d lick clean the wounds they themselves might make.

Tho as Lucy Corin wrote in one of her apocalypses, “[M]aybe it’s not my job at this point to have a problem getting off on something when that’s the way I feel about it.”

There may be only one path per person,
but there’s more than one way to come.